Guild Wars 2

I am a day or two away from having my first lvl80, so it is time I learn the general `rules’ of gearing up.

From what I can tell, Power and Vitality would be core stats for all characters. Obviously, a full glass canon could skip Vitality, but I like a little meat on my characters.

Precision and Critical Damage seem important for most characters. I assume bunker builds, and possibly full condition damage builds, skip these. Would I be correct that anything outside these specific builds would want a bit of them both?

Toughness seems to appear on a lot of gear, so I guess you probably pick up enough of this without specifically looking to add it. Am I right about this?

Condition Damage is where it starts to look vague to me. Outside builds that focus on this, is it worth having a little? For example, Guardians and Mesmers can otherwise have a full Power focus, but still apply conditions. Is it worth their while having a little Condition Damage on the gear to milk some more damage out of those passive benefits?

Healing Power. Everyone has to heal, but does everyone (anyone?) need a little of this? Of all stats, this one seems the most confusing to me.

For Sigils and Runes, what is the general approach players take? Staking their most important stats? Building secondary stats (eg boon duration)? Does this vary wildly from build to build and there is no general rule?

I have been sitting on my Laurels. Yeah, I know, I just had to use it :P I have enough Laurels for one piece of Ascendant jewelry. Which is the most efficient to pick up?

TL;DR

Experiment yourself with different builds, check some online and see what they try to aim, it really much depends on how you like to play.

My biggest tip would be: Play with what you like, not what others like or force you to run.

This is a site that I use for “theorycrafting”: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/
For guides to builds: http://intothemists.com/guides/

Also if you want you can post here what you like to run and I’ll try (focus on try) to make a cool build.

End TL;DR

Well it all depends, I can’t really give you a more specific explanation unless I know what is your play style/profession.

Still, generally I try to do a mix of the following stats (the number is the amount I try to achieve):

- Power: Don’t really care much about this one since it’s everywhere, something around 2500 would be okay to dish some big numbers.

- Toughness: From what I’ve seen having something near 1.8k or 2k toughness still makes you a bit squishy (but maybe it’s because I only get that with thief or mesmer?), I usually tend to be near 2.3k but as what happens with “Power” there are lots of combinations that include it.

- Vitality: As you can tell this is an important stat because conditions bypass armor, I would say that with 18k it’s pretty decent (there are some professions that have something like this as base HP, like necro and warrior so I don’t have to worry much about gearing them some vitality).

- Precision and critical damage: If you want to hit hard you need both, having something around 40% critical chance and 30% critical damage can make some increases, the more the merrier. Although if you aim for high critical chance it means that you need a lot of precision, cutting you off from some other stats.

- Condition damage: I only like to run this if I can place Bleeding and Poison/Confusion, maybe Burning also. Still professions like Guardian don’t have that many conditions (but their Burning hits hard) and have to acquire it from other sources (Sigils are a cheap one), I only run condition damage if I can benefit from it by placing many damaging conditions, otherwise I go for more critical/power. My aim would be to start with something like 600 (or whatever number that you get by only getting Condition Damage gear, not accesories).

- Healing power: I haven’t really tested this but I’ve seen that healing power doesn’t scales too well as one might think, having 1k of it isn’t much of an increase to healing if you had something like 400. I avoid this unless I’m going for a more supportive build that can pop multiple heals.

- Sigils and runes: That pretty much depends on the play style, although I believe a fairly common ones would be Sigil of Force, Superior Runes of Melandru and Sigil of Accuracy.

- Ascendant jewelry: My only tip for this is: DO NOT buy it unless you are confident with your build, test it with exotic accessories before getting the ascended ones. This is just to avoid wasting those Laurels, easiest way to gear up for ascended is (at least worked for me):

1. Rings: Drops from fractals, don’t buy them.
2. Amulet: Purchase from laurel merchant in WvW for 20 Laurels and 250 Badges of Honor.
3. Accesories: Purchase from Guild Commendation Trader for 5 Gold and 12 Guild Commendations.
4. Back piece: It’s grindy but you can get the Prototype Fractal Capacitator, plus has a nice animation :o

Best of luck, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong somewhere ^^

Overall, start tanky then work squishier. You’ll know when you’re too tanky for your damage output.

As said above, found what works for you. Starting more tanky and then mixing in more damage dealing stats as you become more experienced and focus on a certain build. I feel condition damage isn’t worth going for unless you plan to focus primarily on conditions for damage. Otherwise, the base condition amount is fine and going power and crit stuff seems to be more worth it.

My easier suggestion:

• Go to Heart of the Mist
• Try different combinations of amulet (gearing) and weapon sets and traits, a.k.a. different builds. They are all free.
• Go whack the training NPCs. I personally love the char warrior.
• Whack more than 1 NPC at a time.
• Find your favorite play style.
• Now go to a PvP game and smack people.
• If you like what you are doing, it’s good, you’re likely to find out your build.
• If something seems missing, try doing a research in forum and re-adjust the build.
• Now go back to PvE and find the pieces of armors and trinket that you want.

That pretty much sums up how my bf got 8 of his characters ready. He is a quick learner, currently a WvW farmer and a tPvP player